


Full Disclosure

by menecio



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Identities, Bittersweet Ending, Blanket Permission, Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Winona Kirk is Number One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24885781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/menecio/pseuds/menecio
Summary: Winona Kirk’s life is defined by the things she does and does not say.
Relationships: Number One/Christopher Pike, Winona Kirk/Christopher Pike
Comments: 20
Kudos: 23





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Disishistory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Disishistory/gifts).



> Back in early 2017, toakenshire and I asked ourselves what would happen if Winona Kirk and Number One were the same person in AOS. Long story short, I ended up writing 6k worth of ideas in the chat, which I then copy-pasted onto a Docs file and took over three years to wrangle into this hopefully-readable story! Many thanks to toakenshire for holding my hand as I struggled with turning chat-speak into something like prose and beta-ing the finished product! I’m insanely proud of it, flaws and all, so I hope you will enjoy it.

She asks to be called Number One on the ship so people won’t realise it’s her. She has no interest in being Winona Kirk, the Widow. Because that’s what she is—a widow. There used to be more to her, but grief is a powerful thing. She never thought it’d reduce her to a single modifier, but it has.

Widow. Incapable of moving on. She leaves her children behind at every opportunity so she won’t be reminded of what she lost, never focusing on what she _didn’t_ lose. Winona loves her boys, but she thinks she loves the memory of George more. Jim’s face isn’t the face of her youngest child: it’s the solidest apparition of her husband’s ghost, and she can never look at it for too long.

She tried, for a while. She got a desk job on Earth, ran analytics and wrote reports for Starfleet from the dubious comfort of her home. Was a mother, or at least gave it her best shot. She relied on others too much—grandparents, aunts, uncles. One day, she stepped back and realised she wasn’t really needed, so she took a short trip to a lunar base and made herself useful. For the first time in years, she could breathe without feeling choked up.

Widow. Hateful of space, the stars, the Romulans. Hateful of standing still. Winona continues working for Starfleet, not because she likes it—the magic’s gone for her, floating debris in the silence of space—but because it’s an escape. She makes short off-world trips to science stations, away from her grief but closer to the source of it, and, ironically enough, she breathes more easily.

She gets assigned as first officer on a _Constitution_ -class starship a month before Jim, her little haystack, starts primary school. It’s not a long voyage, but it isn’t short either. Two years, give or take. Plenty of time to do some exploring. The news probably shouldn’t please her so much, but it does.

Her youngest cries himself dry in her arms when she breaks the news. He asks her to stay; she explains that she couldn’t say no, that she has to go, that she’ll come back before he knows it. Her oldest refuses to see her off, and she doesn’t make him. He’s right to be angry, even if he doesn’t know it: she could’ve said no if she’d wanted, she could’ve stayed, but she didn’t.

When she returns, Winona hopes they both will have forgiven her for leaving. Anything can happen in two years. By that time, she might have even forgiven herself for wanting to leave so badly.

Christopher Pike is her commanding officer. She knows him—knows how much of a George Kirk fanboy he is. She isn’t looking forward to the gushing and swooning. She’s here to do her job, not hear praise being sung over her dead husband. So she cuts Pike right off when they meet for the first time and he begins to say, one hand extended, “It’s an honour—”

“Captain.” Winona doesn’t exactly glare, but it’s a close thing. “While it’s an honour that you think this is an honour, I would like you to know that my late husband is not to be mentioned, and neither is my name. In this vessel, I am nothing but my position. First officer. Number One. Nothing more.”

She could spell out the whys for him, but she knows she doesn’t need to, knows it’s obvious, so she doesn’t. She’s never been one to rack up excuses and justifications to anyone but her children. There’s a reason for everything she does, and she will explain it if challenged or ordered. Until then, she’s pretty sure she doesn’t owe a single person an explanation. Not even her commanding officer.

Pike looks at her for one stunned moment before composing himself and nodding.

“Of course, Number One.”

His hand is still outstretched. She shakes it then.

* * *

The good thing about Pike is that he’s good at making Winona not be a mystery. He makes calling her Number One a casual yet formal affair. A title, a nickname, but not an alias, not something hiding someone. People don’t go nosing around to dig up information on her. Everyone takes the implicit rule that her past is off-limits with easy disinterest.

There’s speculation, of course, but she’d be more concerned if there weren’t. As it is, Winona just has to neither confirm nor deny the rumours that reach her ears. Soon enough her cover story creates itself without her having told a single lie.

Pike knows about it. Winona actually suspects he’s to blame for some of the details in her made-up biography. She’s sure he hasn’t lied outright, instead using the art of implication the same way she has. For that, she commends him.

They don’t talk about it, but it becomes an unspoken something between them, a game and a conspiracy, a dance whose steps only they know. Whenever they find a new planet, be it class H or M or Y, Pike glances at Winona from his chair with an unreadable smile on his face.

“Reminds you of home, doesn’t it, Number One?” he always asks.

Sometimes she replies something dismissive. Sometimes she merely gives him a blank stare.

It helps them get in sync as a team. Not very honourable, growing closer through gaslighting the crew, but Pike doesn’t mind it, and Winona prefers it to the usual bonding methods. George was the only person that ever made small talk worth her time. Still, Pike and her have found a way to work professionally without getting too personal with each other, which suits Winona’s style.

The crew becomes something like family after a while, the ship something like a home. It’s a weird notion for her. She has family and a home, broken as they are. She doesn’t need people stepping in to fill the roles—holes—in her heart. And yet, that’s exactly what happens.

It’s gradual, almost imperceptible, and by the time she realises, Winona decides that she’s okay with it. The mission will only last two years and then this family will also be broken up, never to come together again. She’s fine with that. It’s only two years. She won’t have to care afterwards. She tells herself that she barely even cares now.

Of course, in a two-year mission, things will go to shit at some point. Bliss can only last so long, and Winona’s allotment of it is especially laughable.

To be fair, there’s a good reason why she breaks down. Not that there needs to be a reason for a breakdown to be an acceptable response to stress, but she still thinks hers is pretty damn justified, all things considered.

It’s a world, and it’s at war, and things have gone well beyond the point of no return by the time they get there to arbitrate the conflict. But that’s not what triggers Winona to hell and back. No, what triggers her is that when they beam down to help evacuate civilians as the planet tears itself apart, she sees a male of the species die as he shields his mate and toddler from an explosion with his own body.

In her head, she hears George, clear as day.

He says, _I love you, I love y—_

She keeps it together as best as she can until they’re back aboard. Then she heads straight to sickbay and asks to be put on sedatives. Her vitals are skyrocketing, peaks and valleys that should not be quite so erratic, so the medic agrees. She crashes into the empty darkness like Icarus into the sea.

When she wakes up, Pike is there.

“All crew accounted for,” he tells her, face serene.

Winona looks at him, then at the ceiling. After a moment, she nods. Pike leaves, but not before assuring her that if there’s anything she needs, anything at all, the medical personnel will provide it. And she can call for him anytime, he adds right before walking out. For what, she doesn’t know. But she can call, and knowing that is frighteningly nice.

They become something less like acquaintances and more like friends after that. Pike still doesn’t mention George, but he does start pestering her with anecdotes about his previous voyages or just mundane shore-leave personal-life things no one gives a crap about.

She shares nothing in exchange.

One day, after Pike is done rambling about his nieces (who are actually his best friend’s daughters, so _technically_ not really related to him, but he aggressively begs to differ), he prompts, “So, er, you’ve got kids, right?”

Winona stays silent.

“How old are they?” He shifts and leans slightly forward as if afraid of being overheard, but that’s unnecessary: they’re alone in a conference room, poring over mission reports as they peck away at replicated meals long gone cold. “I know one must be—”

“Captain,” she interrupts, “my children are not to be mentioned either.”

That’s as close as she’s come to referring to George in the whole mission so far.

Pike looks at her, assessing, then nods. “Of course, Number One.”

They have a lot of false starts like this one. It should make her dislike him, maybe even resent him, but it doesn’t. She doesn’t actually realise that she’s warmed up to him until the two years are almost done. Jim is turning eight years old soon, somewhere in Iowa. She’s going back to Earth soon, but not soon enough to be there for it.

Winona won’t be home for Jim’s birthday, and she won’t be calling. She never does either. It’s a hard date for her, especially since Starfleet has a Kelvin Memorial Day. Pretty hard to leave the past behind when people unbury it and beat it with a stick once a year.

So, rough date. Rough week, in fact. It always feels like pressure building up, the highest point being January 4, and then building down. She doesn’t call in sick, or take the day off, or switch shifts, or visit sickbay, or do anything abnormal. She does consider making a call. She always thinks of calling Jim when she does. Her little haystack. She knows he has it rough, too.

This particular hell week, the eighth one Winona has had to live through, feels strangely lighter. Pike keeps giving her tasks, taxing ones that require her full concentration, but not dull or uninteresting ones. These are all tasks she’s actually pleased and excited to perform. They make her feel engaged, feel useful, because even if she objectively knows that she is of use, it’s always different to achieve feeling that way. Most days, she doesn’t manage it, so she embraces the strong sense of rightness that washes over her now that she temporarily does.

Two days after January 4, they come under attack. Winona performs admirably, but the gash in her head won’t stop bleeding from when a torpedo collided with their ship and sent them bouncing around. She goes to sickbay with blood dripping from her left temple. She bumps into Pike there, who has an arm sling. After a moment of searching her face, a smile blossoms on his own.

“I guess you can hand in your report late,” he jokes.

That’s when she realises he’s been looking after her. This whole week. It doesn’t matter if he noticed she was behaving differently or if he took precautions to ensure she didn’t have such a hard time coping. He looked after her, no prompt needed or questions asked.

She frowns at him, awed and a bit annoyed. “Captain.”

He raises a hand. “Number One, please. How I care for my crew is not to be mentioned.” He pauses. It’s a pause that’s there for the sole purpose of letting her know he isn’t just referring to the paperwork, then says, “Get that cut closed up and hand in your report late.”

Winona stares, then stares some more, then nods. “Of course, Captain.”

She thinks about that after returning to her quarters. From what she knows, Pike had friends on the _Kelvin_. He lost people. Or maybe he didn’t thanks to George Kirk—thanks to her husband. That puts Pike’s fanboy tendencies under a new light. The Kelvin Memorial Day is probably important to him too, and not in a detached nerdy-historian sort of way. And yet through his own probably altered emotional state, he found the time to reach out to her and help.

Winona thinks about Jim. Her little haystack. She loves him, that much she knows, but he makes her so sad. And he knows it. He’s always tried to make her happy when she’s around. He must think he’s bad. He must think she doesn’t love him. She can’t let him think that, so she turns on her computer and types a message.

In the end, she doesn’t send it.

* * *

They return to Earth four months later. There’s a senior staff dinner after all the debriefings and meetings and press conferences—which Winona doesn’t attend—that will delay her trip home a day. She attends it. Then Pike mentions a two-week seminar he’s attending in a few days. She joins him for it. She doesn’t even know what it is about, but she doesn’t care. She just isn’t ready to go home.

She wants to see her children so badly, but it always tears her apart. Seeing Jim grow into George’s face kills her a little more every time. She doesn’t want him to think she doesn’t love him because it’s a lie. She doesn’t want him to think he makes her sad because it’s the truth. That’s why she can’t see him. That’s why she can’t go back home. She would rather be seen as a workaholic mother than a grieving widow still. She would rather have her kids think she’s busy than cowering.

Her oldest sends her a message on the last day of the seminar. He asks when she’s coming home. He tells her they know she’s back. He reminds her Jim turned eight some time ago. He sounds pointed, curt, angry. He sounds the way tweens tend to sound with almost no outside interference.

He’s abusing his personal IM privileges, she tells him. He blocks her.

Like she said, a tween.

She sends Frank a text, tells him to keep an eye on Sam because he’s getting sassy. Frank replies her kids are monsters. Knowing Frank, she knows that comment isn’t an uncle joking about his nephews. She scowls.

 _Well, put a little more effort into raising them right,_ she types.

 _Why don’t you put a little more effort into being around?_ he replies.

_Don’t forget you live off my pay, you greedy little leech._

_Don’t forget I’m raising your kids, you absentee widow._

She snaps her comm closed, the movement precise and ice-cold.

“Something wrong?” Pike asks.

They’re having lunch at a restaurant a few minutes away from the academy.

She puts her comm away. “No.”

“Ah.” Pike nods. “ ‘Not to be mentioned’ stuff. Got it.” He raises a forkful of spaghetti. “Well, I’m here if you need me.”

Then he shoves the pasta into his mouth.

Winona thinks it over. Without the pressure of having to command an entire ship hanging over them, Pike has become more human to her. Or maybe it’s her who has become more human and is allowing herself to actually feel human things like guilt, vulnerability, and emotional exhaustion. Surely a little conversation won’t hurt her. Nothing too deep, just a bit of complaining. Pike talks her ear off enough. She can retaliate just a bit, just this once.

“Full disclosure?” she starts, then sighs. “My brother’s being an ass.”

“Your brother?”

“And my son just blocked me on the comm.” At Pike’s blank look, she clarifies, “The older one.”

Pike looks at her, lips pursed as though he’s thinking. He nods again, wipes sauce off his lips, and sets the napkin down. “One of my nieces won’t talk to me because I missed her quinceañera. And her dad’s not pissed at me, per se, but he’s definitely taken her side on this. I did promise I’d be back on time. But, of course, that mission on Travya VI…”

He almost doesn’t need to trail off. Winona’s reaction is instantaneous and visceral.

“God, ugh,” she groans.

Pike makes a similar sound. “I know! It was such a shitshow.”

“I still don’t understand why they assigned it to us.”

“Because those assholes in High Command know nothing.”

They groan again and then laugh.

Well, more like Pike laughs and Winona gives a quiet and amused huff that feels like air escaping out of a balloon that was too full of it. But it works. For a moment, she forgets about Frank and Sam and all the things waiting for her down in Iowa—the guilt and the heartbreak and the frustration. She picks at her plate, finding the food appetising for the first time since she entered the establishment. She takes a bite, chews, raises a hand to her mouth so Pike won’t see flashes of half-munched pasta as she talks.

“What are you doing after the seminar?”

“You mean tonight or after the whole thing’s over?”

“After.”

“I have a press conference or two more and then I’m free. Don’t you have to go to those too, by the way? You’re my first officer.”

Winona shakes her head, but she doesn’t tell Pike about how she pressed Starfleet into giving her ‘media insulation’ if they wanted her to stick around. She isn’t legally required to attend, but she may if she so wishes. She doesn’t.

“Lucky bastard,” Pike mutters. “So what’s _your_ plan after the seminar? Heading home?”

“I might stick around a little longer. San Francisco’s nice this time of the year.”

Pike beams at her. “If you do, ring me up. We can get dinner or something. Bitch some more about High Command being full of idiots.”

Winona hasn’t dated in almost a decade. Still, she’s fluent in the language of flirting and particularly in the language of Pike. She knows where he’s getting at with that carefully crafted pseudo-casual comment. Panic shoots up her spine and rakes through her chest, but then she tackles it back down. She’s in control.

Her lips curl into a small smile. “We’ll see.”


	2. Chapter 2

They begin sort of dating, and Winona is using the term very loosely. Pike wastes no time in introducing her to his best friend and nieces and parents. Not as his date or girlfriend or fling, but as his Number One. Winona likes that.

She doesn’t take him home, even though he is the kind of man many would die to have sit in their living room and sip homemade lemonade. He’s not a secret, but she can’t imagine introducing him to the boys. It’s none of their business anyway. Their father’s dead. She’s been a widow long enough. She can move on. She can try to.

She stops dyeing her hair, and it grows dark and glossy. She cuts the yellow ends, dry and dead. After almost two years, they go on a second mission. It’ll be three years in space this time, both of them returning as Captain and First Officer. Her hair is just past her shoulders by then. Pike hasn’t told her, but she knows he likes it. She wouldn’t care if he didn’t, but the fact that he does only cements her decision.

This is who she is now. Number One. Dark-haired, aloof, exemplary. There’s a blue-eyed man in her bed some nights, and he’s not George, but she doesn’t think of him as being the wrong man. She just thinks of him as Pike. Pike is in her bed some nights, and some others she is in his, and he calls her Number One, and every day she feels closer and closer to fine.

Then Jim gets himself arrested at the ripe age of _eleven_ while Winona is in deep space, and she has to handle the whole thing from lightyears away. There’s a lot of paperwork, a lot of calls, a lot of gritting her teeth. She keeps her head, powers through it, lands Jim as safely as she can on the other side of the storm. She doesn’t speak to him during the process. She has nothing to say that he doesn’t know. She has nothing to say he wants to hear.

The whole ordeal puts a strain in her relationship with Pike. Winona finds it darkly amusing: Pike doesn’t even know all of it. He has no idea Sam ran away the same day Jim drove George’s old car off a quarry, and she doesn’t think it’s any of his damn business. Incomplete intel and all, he still snaps at her one night when his emotions boil over.

“You’re not acting like his mother, for God’s sake! He’s your son!” He rakes his hands through his hair, then clasps his hands together in supplication. “Please, I beg of you, talk to him. Don’t you think he’s lonely enough? Don’t you care about him?”

“Like a thorn in my side,” she snaps back, then goes quiet with how shocked she is by her own words. Jim isn’t a thorn. He’s a good boy. Quiet. Well-mannered. Intelligent. He sends her mails sometimes, or at least used to, sweet like hers could never be. Jim isn’t a thorn. Or a needle. He’s a haystack.

But before she can take back what she has said, Pike says, “You aren’t the woman I thought.”

He leaves, the door sliding closed behind him and crunching on her heart. Winona, who this time had the chance to keep her man in her life, doesn’t stop him. She watches him go. She watches him go for a long while after he has gone, the afterimage of his retreating back coming down on her heart like a hammer with each blink she gives to dispel it.

She wraps up her business with Jim. House arrest, summer school, and voluntary community service at the nearby shipyard to shorten the time he will have to be cooped up at home. Pretty good, all things considered. Then she does her best to track down Sam, to no avail. Her son is smart, and he won’t be found unless he wants them to find him. After all that is done, Winona deals with the asshole she has for a brother. It requires quite a lot more paperwork and shouting, but she’s used to fighting by now. Life is nothing but fight after fight for her. Most times, she loses. This time, she wins.

Pike and Winona sleep in their own beds for the rest of the mission. When the three years end, they go their separate ways. Winona stays on Earth long enough to make sure Jim is okay, then takes up a permanent position off-world in a space station. Jim tells her he might visit sometime. He says it as though he doesn’t actually want to, doesn’t actually care, his voice rough and eyes red from crying when she can’t see him. He looks nothing like George, gaunt and dry and brittle. A haystack in the lean months. It’s easier to love him like this, and she feels like the worst of scum for it.

* * *

Years later, Winona finds out Pike basically recruited Jim into Starfleet. She calls him. He picks up. She starts with a calm, “Full disclosure,” and then devolves into screaming obscenities at him.

Pike waits for her to finish, his mouth set into an unimpressed line, and then asks, “Are you really saying you’re mad at me because I’m helping your son get his act together?”

“He’s not yours to do this!” Winona says.

“Fuck blood relations,” Pike says, and his fury is as cold as it is beautiful. “I have two nieces who can rely on me, and now I’ll have a son who can do the same. Because he certainly can’t count on his mother.”

“You’re _way_ out of line here, Pike.”

“I’m not,” he says. “You are.”

And he hangs up on her.

She calls again. The motherfucker actually picks up.

“Listen, you piece of shit,” she says. “Step the hell off my son. You can’t have him.”

“If I step off, will you step up?”

“ _It’s his life._ I have no say in how he lives it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

He moves to hang up again, and she yells, “You can’t have him!”

Pike stills at that. He searches her face. “Why not?”

“You took George,” she says, her heart breaking all over again, and she’s tired of it, but it seems the universe likes it better when it’s shattered to pieces. “You took George, and you can’t take Jim, too. _Fuck you_ , I won’t let you!”

“Number One,” he says, folding his hands, “to him, Starfleet took you both.”

It’s Winona who stills then. Pike’s face is impassive, the way it used to become calm and inscrutable when he commanded a harsh order or made a tough decision.

“Jim isn’t joining because it’ll take him away,” Pike says. “He’s joining because it might take him to you.”

* * *

Oddly enough, Pike’s meddling and the subsequent fiasco that was Winona’s call leads them to getting reacquainted. Pike is kind of Jim’s mentor in the Academy, so he keeps Winona up to date. He tells her about Jim’s brightness, stubbornness, cheekiness. He tells her the good and the bad, Jim’s knack for making friends out of enemies and enemies out of assholes. He also tells her inane details like the fact that Jim eats apples during sims to annoy the examiners, or which classmate Jim is dating that week.

Winona is very proud but also very scared. The Academy is innocuous enough, but she knows where the Academy leads for bright students: up and away into the indifferent cosmos. The first time Jim goes on a training mission for his space credits, the space station’s CMO gives Winona some mild sedatives and puts her on medical leave for three days. Jim returns from his mission a month later, safe and sound.

Some weeks before Jim starts his second year, Winona visits Earth. He’s on holidays and she’s afraid he might have stuck around the Academy, but he’s gone. Pike, however, is in town. She knew he would be. After all, she’s there to grab dinner with him.

It’s nothing romantic. Just old acquaintances meeting up. Pike talks about his nieces for most of the night, Winona having spent years without hearing anything about them and him more than willing to catch her up. When he finally breaches the subject of Jim, somewhere between dessert and coffee, she lets him.

He sounds like a proud dad, and it chokes her up a little. He talks and talks, telling her things he’s already said over the comm, but the warm light of the establishment makes him come alive, eyes shining, cheeks flushed, hands gesturing. Winona listens, and sees Jim gallivanting through the Academy and doing everything Pike describes, from licking a grumpy friend’s ear to finishing the Abstract Algebraic Structures test in record time and not making a single mistake.

Once Pike is done gushing over Jim, he says, “Full disclosure, he’s a great kid.”

Winona takes in the shine in Pike’s blue eyes, and for a split second she desperately wishes it were George sitting across from her saying that. For one split second, she can see her husband grinning at her from across the table with his shore-leave stubble and his shining blue eyes.

She reaches across the table and takes Pike’s hand. He’s warm and soft, the hands of a captain whose specialty is diplomacy and exploration. The hands of a man who lifted her son from the dirt with nothing but some well-placed words. She likes his hands. They’re different. They’re his.

She squeezes his hand. He squeezes back.

* * *

They rekindle the flame after that. Sort of. They are careful around each other, and Winona is due to return to the station anyway. Pike tries to get her to move to San Francisco, find a position there. She says no. He isn’t happy, but he relents. He understands, or tries to, and knows he can’t tell Winona what to do now any more than he could when she was his First Officer. She buys him dinner for being so agreeable.

Winona meets a young Vulcan man while she’s in San Francisco. His presence isn’t exactly surprising, the Academy being the interspecies salad bowl that it is, but the way he doesn’t quite seem to fit when he is obviously trying to leaves Winona at a loss. Their meeting is a quick affair, brought about by sharing lab space for a few days. They get on just fine, neither getting in each other’s way and not doing much conversing beyond exchanging names—he introduces himself as Spock, Winona as Number One—and the odd mutually relevant comment.

Over lunch, she admits to Pike that if she were confined to close quarters with him or any other Vulcan for longer than a month, she would probably stun herself. Pike laughs and says, “Now you know,” because he’s an asshole. Winona refrains from throwing her napkin at him.

* * *

They stay in touch. Pike is to become captain of the _USS Enterprise_ when its construction is completed in two years. Meanwhile, he’s running three-month missions and giving seminars. One time, Winona visits Earth, and they go down to Iowa. They go to the Riverside Shipyard and walk around the _Enterprise_ ’s open belly, exchanging comments on the structure and the systems and the sleek prowess of her design.

They head back to Winona’s home late in the evening, have replicated dinner that tastes hilariously awful because the replicator hasn’t been updated in probably a decade, and pour themselves some red wine to wash down the strangely dusty taste. They drink it in the living room. Only the small table lamp in the corner is on. Winona is curled up on the sofa, her favourite spot in the house, and Pike is leaning against the window frame, looking soft and warm in the lamplight.

In the ensuing quiet, he asks if she’ll be his first officer again. It’s as close to a marriage proposal as he’ll get.

She says no.

“Of course,” he says, chuckles, looks down at his glass of wine and then out the window. “Full disclosure, that hurts.”

“You know how things are,” she tells him.

He nods. “They’re shitty, that’s how.”

“Pike—”

“Not _Pike,_ for God’s sake—” He cuts himself off and takes a breath. He’s been trying to get her to call him Chris for years, but she hasn’t buckled, and the one time he tried to call her something other than Number One isn’t worth mentioning. He rubs the bridge of his nose, exhales. “Look, the maiden voyage isn’t until June next year. If you change your mind, just let me know. And if you don’t… please be there. See me off?”

Winona thinks about it, her lips pressed into an unhappy line. “We’ll see.”

* * *

Since the attack on Vulcan results in the emergency christening of the _USS Enterprise_ , Winona isn’t there for her first launch. As a matter of fact, Winona isn’t there for anything that happens during the crisis, either, and she can’t decide if that’s good or bad. She might have been able to help more, to do more, if she had been there with the rest of the crew, standing next to Pike and working in perfect legendary sync with him. But she wasn’t, so she didn’t, and things happen as they do.

Winona goes to see Pike at the hospital after they return to Earth from their adventure. She bumps into Jim at the door to Pike’s room, going out as she goes in. The unexpected meeting shocks her badly. He’s taller, broader, a man. When did she last see him? Has it really been so long?

Then she takes a second to be annoyed at Spock—she just saw him in the hospital’s main hall, and he told her Captain Pike was free to see her but failed to mention anything about her son being there, _the cheating cheat_. Winona is going to have words of the screamy kind with that Vulcan. But, right now, she has to handle this. So she sucks in a little breath, squares her shoulders, and when Jim gives a startled and weak, “Mama,” she promptly bursts into tears.

She could have lost them _both_.

It soon becomes clear that Jim has no idea what to do with an armful of crying estranged mother, so Winona gets herself ruthlessly under control. She rubs his back as a few tears also escape his eyes. Jim is a sensitive boy, but she thought he’d cried himself dry years ago.

Things get a little awkward when he asks why she’s there. Saying that she’s visiting Captain Pike doesn’t leave her off the hook: it just raises more questions. That’s when she remembers Jim doesn’t actually _know_ what she’s been doing with her Starfleet career.

“Number One?” comes Pike’s voice from inside his hospital room.

Jim frowns.

She explains, “I was his first officer.”

Jim’s confused look dissolves, but it’s replaced by outraged disbelief.

“Pike!” he calls, storming back into the room.

Apparently, Jim doesn’t appreciate the fact that Pike didn’t tell him he knew his mum.

They don’t say they used to date and are currently maybe kind of dating. Winona emphasises the ‘maybe’ in her mind because she did turn down his quasi-marriage proposal and then did a pretty lousy job of answering his comms and showing up to the _Enterprise_ ’s first launch—although, in her defence, that last one isn’t her fault. They just say they’re old friends, which is true enough.

Well, Pike says ‘friends’, drowning out Winona’s ‘acquaintances’. Jim squints at them.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks.

Pike shrugs. “Why bring it up? You hate talking about family. It’s a family thing, really,” he says, then grins at his own and frankly very stupid wordplay.

“I had a right to know,” Jim insists. He glares at Pike, who for some reason seems to be more at fault than Winona here. It’s probably because he has actually talked with Jim in the last few years. “Are you going to tell me you know Sam, too? And Frank? Do you send him comms to prison?”

They snipe at each other some more before Jim settles with a wounded air. He stands up to leave, and Pike looks at Winona in a way that says, _If you don’t go with him, I will never forgive you_.

So she goes.

They walk out of the hospital together. Winona likes to think the silence between them isn’t tense, but she would be lying. There is no animosity coming from Jim, at least, and Winona finds her thoughts snagging on that and pulling at her heart. She feels relief at that realisation, plenty of it, but the guilt is almost enough to overwhelm it completely. She doesn’t deserve this near-nonchalance. She doesn’t deserve this lackadaisical kindness. She deserves Jim’s snark, Jim’s anger. Instead, she gets polite bemusement.

Unsurprisingly, their walk is reigned by silence, interrupted by short bursts of conversation. They make no effort to talk about anything substantial, staying well within the safe parameters of small talk. Winona tends to detest this kind of stilted interactions, far too unwilling to put up with bullshit politesse. Right now, however, she is absorbing every word as though they were water.

“Are you staying long?” Jim asks after a few minutes.

“No,” Winona says, unused to anything but bluntness in her replies.

Jim makes an acknowledging sound at the back of his throat, and that seems to mark the end of their small exchanges. A few minutes later, they reach the building where Jim is staying. Winona doesn’t know why she’s followed him here except that she knows Pike would have wanted her to and a sharp pain lanced her chest each time she considered walking away. She’s bound by duty to stay, she’s bound by love not to leave.

Jim turns to her. She stands there, hands behind her back and feet slightly apart in a casual parade rest. Jim gives her a funny look that she doesn’t understand, then motions to the building’s door.

“Want to come up? We can…” He trails off. It’s obvious he doesn’t know how to finish that sentence. He shrugs, gives her a strained smile. “Catch up, I guess. We should.”

Winona stands there. The seconds trickle by, and at last she shifts and says, “I don’t think—”

“Mum, please,” Jim’s voice is brittle now, and the blue of his eyes resembles glass rather than ice. “Please come up.”

She goes up. They have a simple meal in the kitchen isle. She doesn’t talk much. Winona doesn’t talk much as a rule, but Jim fills the silence. Shy and brief at first, then with easy enthusiasm. There’s a lull at one point, and she knows that he’s not done talking. He’s just having one of those moments where an epiphany hits. He’s probably thinking, _I’m having lunch with my mum_ or, _My mum’s in front of me for the first time in twelve years_ or, _We’ll soon part ways_.

She knows he’s probably thinking something along those lines because those are the things she’s been thinking for the past two hours. She also knows there’s nothing they can do to change any of that. She’s been gone, and she’s been absent, and she’s got duties that will take her away again, just like his soon will. Even if she chose to stay now, the time of being there for her son is over. He is grown. He has his own life, he knows how to live it, and she has no place in it.

She stands up and says she should leave. Jim doesn’t ask her to stay. He walks her to the door. She pats him in the arm as goodbye.

“Can I call you?” he asks. “Not always, just… sometimes.”

She looks at him, sees George asking if he can take her to the movies sometime, sees Pike asking if they could have dinner someday, sees Sam asking if she’s going to visit next time she’s on Earth. This time, she doesn’t say ‘we’ll see’.

“Of course, Jim.”

After Pike is released from hospital, the three of them have dinner. It’s surprisingly nice, full of jokes and mock-glares and flavoursome dishes. And then she leaves. She’s being recalled to her post. Jim asks if she’s going to be there for his graduation. She says she doesn’t think she can make it. Jim just nods: he’s used to being disappointed by her. They shake hands. Then, just before releasing her hand, Jim gives a tug so small it’s almost nonexistent, but she understands it for what it is. She steps forward and goes on her tiptoes, folding him into an embrace. He holds on impossibly tight.

“You be a good haystack now,” she says, the nickname rusty in her mouth.

Jim smiles against her shoulder all the same. “Yes, Mama.”

They can never regain what was lost to time, but at least they have this.

* * *

As promised, Jim doesn’t call often. He doesn’t send emails often either. Winona is thankful for that. Pike spams her inbox enough. He also calls her at ungodly hours just to laugh at her bed hair.

“I thought admirals were adults,” she tells him one time.

He only laughs harder.

A year later, Jim violates the Prime Directive and lands himself in a spectacular spot of trouble. When Winona finds out, the first thing she does is call Pike and rant about how they can’t dishonourably discharge her son on those grounds. He did it to save a crewmate, who is also the member of an endangered sentient species, might she add. An endangered sentient species that helped found the Federation. There must be something they can do to soften the blow that High Command’s stupid committee is probably planning to put together.

Something about her tone must show how frazzled she is by the entire thing. It’s strange, how upset she is over a situation that should be relieving to her. Jim’s fall from grace would keep him away from the vanguard, away from danger. It would also kill him slowly, and Winona cannot condone such a thing.

“Let me see what I can do,” he says.

It would sound lackluster if anyone else said it, but Pike means it with every fiber of his being. He’ll do what he can, and that is usually a lot. He reassures her some more, then hangs up with her to call in all the favours he is owed and some he isn’t. A while later, he calls her back to update her on the situation: he has managed to get temporarily assigned as the _Enterprise_ ’s captain, Jim under his command on a probation period rather than demoting him. He kicked Spock to another vessel, something he seems pained to have done if the grimace on the screen is anything to go by. But Pike recovers quickly, saying that Spock can get reassigned to the _Enterprise_ once Pike is done hammering some common sense into Jim or at least teaching him to be more subtle about breaking the rules.

After he achieves that, Pike explains, all he needs to do is clear Jim for captaining and step off. It will probably take a year or two, but Pike is determined to do it in six months. He isn’t interested in being given a five-year mission. Admiralty might be boring as heck, but he’s finally accepted that he’s too old to traipse around the uncharted universe.

* * *

The last contact he has with Winona isn't even a conversation. It’s an email he sends knowing fully well that she’ll take at least a day to read—she gives work-related messages all her priority, and a space station commander has plenty of mail to sort through.

In it, he writes a lot of rambly shit about Jim being a monster (but it’s obvious he means it with buckets of exasperated affection) and all the dinners she owes him for putting up with the kid. At the end, he mentions the terrorist attack that happened just a few hours ago and says, _We’re meeting in a bit to address the issue_. He goes on to say that he hopes she’s doing well and signs off, because he likes teasing her, with:

_Love,  
Pike_

_P.S.: If you reply in under 10 hours, you get a prize._

Of course, she doesn’t read the mail until a week later because she’s too busy finding out he’s dead, then finding out her son’s gone to Kronos, then finding out the _USS Enterprise_ is dropping from the sky with her son in it, then finding out her son’s at the hospital after having sidestepped death by just a smidge. When she finally has a moment to sit and process what happened, all Winona can think of is how she’d refused Pike’s proposal to be his First Officer once again last time he offered, and now she’ll never stand on a bridge with him ever again.

She hasn’t felt this lonely in a long time.


	3. Chapter 3

Winona never finds out Jim died. Jim chooses not to tell her. it’s confidential information anyway, but he is certain she would crumble under the weight of that knowledge. She visits him a few times at the hospital, always silent and composed. Jim knows that face. It’s the one she would wear during those early years when she still agreed to go to the Kelvin Day memorial service. Basically, she’s dead inside.

Jim doubts his ‘near-death’ could have caused this. Certainly a breakdown, but not this level of grief and mourning. And that’s when it clicks. She’s resting one hand on his arm, not saying anything, just keeping him company, so he moves his other arm and puts a hand on top of hers.

“I’m sorry,” he says. She gives him an empty look. He squeezes. “Mama. I’m so damn sorry.”

Her chin trembles and she bites her lips, silent tears slipping down her cheeks. She nods, as thanks, as acknowledgement, as confirmation. Jim doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Yet again, Winona Kirk has lost one of her boys. First was George, then Sam who ran away, then Frank whom she put in jail herself, and now… now she has lost Pike. A man whose company she appreciated more than she had ever let on, at least in front of Jim.

Jim is the only person she has left.

After he is discharged from hospital, Jim talks to Spock about it. His First Officer admits that in those last seconds of Pike’s life, he could sense Winona in Pike’s mind. The feelings Pike experienced as he died were tinted in hues, fractured into pieces that each gave the emotion a new facet. Anger—at himself, at Khan, at not seeing it coming. Pain—physical but also mental, the agony of feeling his thoughts slip and crash. Hopelessness—at being faced with death, but also at not being able to go through with all those plans he’d made for the future. And here was where Winona featured heavily, the imprint of her, as well as Pike’s most tender emotions.

Jim asks if Spock could isolate those emotions and show them to his mother.

“It might help,” he says. “With closure.”

 _It might work as a final goodbye_ , he doesn’t say. _Something she was never afforded._

Spock says he can try, so Jim tells his mother about it.

She refuses. Jim gets angry.

“I’m trying to help you,” he says.

“Just let it lie,” Winona says. Pleads, really. “He’s dead and nothing will bring him back. I don’t want him to say things to me from beyond the grave or through someone else’s mind. I don’t want to be reminded. I want to remember him on my own terms.”

And Jim understands, in a sudden moment of clarity, that this is what eroded at Winona all those years until she was nothing but sand: being reminded, having her husband’s death idolised and shoved under her nose, year after year, day after day. In the streets, in public places, in the vessels where she worked. Her life is riddled with looming ghosts.

The lives George saved, and the lives he didn't. The son he met, and the son he didn’t. The life he had, and the life he didn't. The son she failed, and the one she abandoned. The brother she betrayed, and the uncle she punished. The lover she pushed away until it was too late to pull him close.

It makes sense, then, that Winona Kirk is so fucking done with ghosts.

* * *

Pike’s funeral is the worst thing Winona has experienced in years, and her life is no bed of roses. Some would say the death itself is worse, but Winona hurts the most when people pick at her wounds until they bleed anew. They can never let it lie. But she loved—loves—the man too much to miss it. So she goes, dressed to the nines in her grey uniform. Jim’s hand is in hers, warm and alive, the only thing keeping her from flying to pieces.

She could’ve lost them both. This time, she lost one of them.

Winona’s eyes sting, so she counts her blessings. They are so very few, so very brittle, and she cherishes them so very much. It’s no wonder whenever one breaks, her heart shatters along with it. But Jim’s hand is warm and alive, rougher than Pike’s but softer than George’s, and that is more than plenty. She squeezes Jim’s hand, and he squeezes hers back, and she thinks that this is more than enough.

After all the funerals for all the people who died during the incident are over, repairs begin. It soon becomes obvious that it will take a while for the _Enterprise_ to get fixed, so Jim spends his birthday on Earth, in the Iowa farm. Winona is there with him. She’s doing it for Pike, hopes he can see her finally stepping up, but she’s also doing it for Jim. Deep down, she knows she’s also doing it for herself.

She keeps looking at the clock as it inches closer to midnight, curled up on the old sofa. Jim’s reading on his PADD quietly, legs stretched out in front of him as he slouches in the armchair. He looks, of all things, comfortable.

Then the clock strikes twelve. It chimes, deafeningly soft in the quiet. Jim doesn’t glance up, doesn’t move, yet Winona can see that his body tenses. She stands up and steps closer—steps up—to him. At first, he pretends he doesn’t notice. After a few seconds, he looks at her, eyes so blue and uncertain, and she looks at him, looks at _Jim_ , and sees a beautiful young man that she’s taken years to learn to love without pain or fear.

Her hand comes up to stroke his golden hair. A haystack, she’d called it once, a long time ago.

She smiles. “Happy birthday, son.”


End file.
